‘Hyperconverged infrastructure’ is growing in popularity but competition is also stiffening

Nutanix Inc. is set to go public in a long-delayed test of investor attitudes about the technology sector. But the offering also may serve as a referendum on whether a new computing approach will wind up as a market niche or the next big thing in corporate technology.

The Silicon Valley company, which priced its shares late Thursday, joined the ranks of billion-dollar startups on the notion of merging two classes of data-center hardware—servers and data-storage systems—into a single box. Nutanix’s founders have said they...